Rituals for Work: 50 Ways to Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, and a Culture that Can Adapt to Change

by Kursat Ozenc

The Failure Wake Party

it is okay to fail if they do so when experimenting on making things better.

What Is the Ritual? The Skill-Share Fest is a day off from the normal work routine, where team members share their maker skills with one another in a festive environment.

Everyone can teach the rest of their team how to cook a certain dish, build something, perform a dance, make a craft, or some other skill that they've developed. It's structured like an “unconference” where individuals can set the agenda by proposing sessions they'd like to offer, or those they'd like to attend.

They created a basic infrastructure for the event, and then had the employees become the teachers to drive the schedule and content.

The event should let employees' passions and talents shine—especially helping introverts to take the lead in setting the agenda.

Other companies might adapt the day-long Skill Share Festival to a smaller workshop, where people go around and quickly share a talent and teach it to the other attendees. A key point for adaptation is to make the people sharing their skills into the “heroes”—spotlighting them, their contributions, and showing appreciation to them.

In addition, you might wear a special, bright pair of headphones while you are doing the Focus Rock ritual, to signal to others around you in a co-working or office space that you are doing deep work and should not be interrupted.

There are no silver bullets. Companies need to invest in understanding their environment—including their culture, values, people, skills, personality types, products, locations, time zones, expertise, customers, pace of change, innovation etc. Make sure that what you try works for you. A final message from Dom: don't try to spread culture (or rituals) through mandate. A plan that has an official rollout likely will not work well. Let people come, have them direct it, and have them adapt it to their own needs. Otherwise, you will just get compliance—and not a healthy team.

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